My answer is unpopular, but I don't think Perl programmers should be trying to use the exceedingly poor notion of the thing we call "exceptions" in Perl. These are essentially a side channel return value. However, still being enamored with the idea of exceptions, even with all the complexities of using a global variable to pass around state, people keep trying to make it work.

Practically, however, people use die to signal failure. Some will say that you can die with a reference and pass back error objects, but you don't need die for that. We have objects, so we should use all the power of objects:

That doesn't involve global variables, action at a distance, scoping headaches, or require special specials. You create a tiny class Result, or whatever you want to call it, to wrap your return values so you have structured data instead of single values with no identity. There's no more wondering what a return value means. Is that undef a real value or an indication of failure? Is the return value good if it's defined or if it's true? Your object can tell you these things. And, you can use the same object with die. If you're already using the object with die and using it as the return value, there's very little to recommend all the extra stuff you have to do to tolerate $@.